Books For Suffering Christians
If you are suffering or if you want to help those who are suffering, you need to read the books below.
Everest cannot be navigated by inexperienced climbers. To get through the treacherous terrain you need a sherpa. Someone who has passed through the terrain before. Who can say: “Put your foot here, watch out for that slippery step, get rest on the 4th day.”
For those suffering
This same principle applies to grief and suffering. When Christians are walking through grief, sometimes the most helpful gift is a sherpa that has walked that terrain and can offer some thoughts. Even if just, “I know it’s hard, I’ve walked that too.” Below I’ve listed four articles that I found extremely helpful for walking me through my own griefs and sufferings.
for those helping
I’d like to offer a special note to pastors, counselors, and intentional friends who want to help others who are grieving and suffering. Some of the most profound learning I’ve done related to helping those who suffer is through reading the books below. If you seek to help, read these books.
1- A Grief Observed (Order)
In this short book, C.S. Lewis writes about his grief following the death of his wife. This isn’t a neat, perfectly wrapped, clean version of grief, but a picture of realistic grief. Full of hard questions. I was encouraged by Lewis’s vulnerability:
“When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.”
— C.S. Lewis
2- A Grace Disguised: How The Soul Grows Through Loss (Order) -
This book, by Jerry Sittser, is a journey that seeks to grapple with how to have a relationship with God while in the darkness of suffering. If you feel like your loss has hampered your relationship with God, this book is the sherpa to walk through grief with you.
“I see now that my faith was becoming an ally rather than an enemy because I could vent anger freely, even toward God, without fearing retribution.”
― Jerry Sittser
The sovereign God came in Jesus Christ to suffer with us and to suffer for us. He descended deeper into the pit than we will ever know. His sovereignty did not protect him from loss. If anything, it led him to suffer loss for our sake. God is therefore not simply some distant being who controls the world by a mysterious power. God came all the way to us and lived among us… The God I know has experienced pain and therefore understands my pain.
― Jerry Sittser
This book has taught me more about grief and God than any other book on this list.
3- How long, Oh Lord? (Order) -
If your suffering has caused you to wrestle with the problem of evil, or ruptured your trust in a good, loving God, this is your book. More academic in nature than the other books on this list, D.A. Carson balances the mystery of suffering with what we truly can know from scripture. It examines some of these hard questions and is a helpful resource for pastors and leaders, as well as thoughtful Christians.
“To walk into the unknown with a God of unqualified power and unfailing goodness is safer than a known way.”
― D.A. Carson
“However hard some things are to understand, it is never helpful to start picking and choosing biblical truths we find congenial, as if the Bible is an open-shelved supermarket where we are at perfect liberty to choose only the chocolate bars. For the Christian, it is God's Word, and it is not negotiable. What answers we find may not be exhaustive, but they give us the God who is there, and who gives us some measure of comfort and assurance. The alternative is a god we manufacture, and who provides no comfort at all. Whatever comfort we feel is self-delusion, and it will be stripped away at the end when we give an account to the God who has spoken to us, not only in Scripture, but supremely in his Son Jesus Christ.”
― D.A. Carson
4- Lament for a Son (Order)
The pain of losing a child is unparalleled. From the books forward: “This book was written more than twelve years ago to honor the author's son Eric, who died in a mountain-climbing accident in Austria in his twenty-fifth year, and to voice Wolterstorff's grief. Though it is intensely personal, he decided to publish it in the hope that some of those who sit on the mourning bench for children would find his words giving voice to their own honoring and grieving.”
“God is not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers. ... It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one could see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor. ... Instead of explaining our suffering God shares it.”
— Nicholas Wolterstorff
“Don’t say it’s not really so bad. Because it is. Death is awful, demonic. If you think your task as comforter is to tell me that really, all things considered, it’s not so bad, you do not sit with me in my grief but place yourself off in the distance away from me. Over there, you are of no help.”
― Nicholas Wolterstorff
These books can be incredibly difficult reads, for they force us to grapple with the reality that many of us are naive of. This world is painful. But, that’s a difficulty we need to grapple with, both as we seek to love others well through their suffering and find anchors of hope in our own.
Warmly,
Josh.
